A political pick for Brooks, but is it the right one?

Updated 4:52 pm, Monday, April 15, 2013

You never know how an executive search will play out. Maybe the best candidate will materialize out of the ether, an unknown who emerges ready to map the way forward and solve every problem that's plaguing an organization.

Manuel Pelaez-Prada didn't go that far and wasn't quite that exuberant in an interview with me in October. But he did say, “Until a final decision is made, anything can happen.”

He's chairman of the Brooks Development Authority, which oversees the redevelopment of Brooks City-Base on the Southeast Side, and he was talking about the agency's hunt for a new CEO.

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He says more than 400 candidates were looked at in a process that lasted several months. Presumably, there were plenty of pleasant and unpleasant surprises and dark horses packed into the files of Deacon Recruiting, the headhunting firm hired by BDA's board of directors.

At their meeting last Tuesday, the City Council-appointed board finally announced that it's hammering out an employment agreement with a finalist — whom directors declined to publicly identify.

Nevertheless, we know who the person is.

After all the presumed twists and turns, in a search in which anything could happen, the board settled on Leo Gomez — the Spurs Sports & Entertainment exec who was always the insiders' favored candidate, the one said to have had the backing of former Mayor Henry Cisneros and a Who's Who of elected officials and business leaders.

Gomez is the political choice.

But we won't know for months whether he's also the right choice, the one capable of finishing the build-out of the former Air Force base's infrastructure and luring private industry to the 1,200-acre business park.

Gomez declined to comment for this column.

He's SS&E's vice president of external affairs and corporate development, which means he's the go-to guy whenever the organization needs something from City Hall, the Bexar County Courthouse or the Legislature, or is looking to acquire a property. Gomez probably was at his savviest when he helped win support for building the AT&T Center and cut a complicated lease agreement with Bexar County.

He also spent a year and a half at Toyota's pickup plant on the South Side, overseeing its administration, a stretch that overlapped with Pelaez-Prada, who served as the automaker's local counsel. Part of Gomez's job there was to work out deals to bring 21 parts suppliers next door to Toyota's sprawling manufacturing facility. He also identified locals — such as Cisneros and businessman Berto Guerra, currently chairman of the San Antonio Water System — who could become partners in those suppliers.

All of which has left him very well-connected. Gomez is cheerful, cautious but approachable with reporters, and completely at ease with politicians and government staffers.

But is he really the best qualified out of 400-plus job seekers to manage a business park that's going through an identity crisis? Is Brooks a center for technology and R&D, as originally intended? (If so, how good will Gomez be at persuading companies to move operations there?) Or should it be a mixed-use development, with more single-family units and retail? (If so, how much experience does Gomez have working out the inevitable real estate kinks?)

In an interview two days after BDA directors picked their finalist, Pelaez-Prada still wouldn't name the person. He expected the authority to make the announcement and the board to vote on the finalist's employment contract this week.

But he was willing to talk a little about this unidentified winner, who's expected to earn around $200,000 a year.

“More than anything it came down to passion for product, for our brand and for our mission,” Pelaez-Prada said. The finalist, he added, showed an understanding of the challenges facing Brooks City-Base and had “a proven track record with large, complex projects.”

Give Gomez his due. Dealing with 21 Toyota suppliers and helping piece together a city and county incentives package couldn't have been easy. And neither was landing the AT&T Center, the construction of which was bankrolled by a voter-backed venue tax.

That deal has worked out beautifully for the Spurs. Much less so for the East Side, which has seen little benefit from having the arena in its backyard.

However, Gomez — who was born in Edinburg, raised in McAllen and has spent most of his working life here — is trying to do his part. He's chairman of San Antonio for Growth on the Eastside, a group best known for its grants to small businesses but that is struggling for funding.

Don't get me wrong. Gomez could be a blessing for Brooks and the Southeast Side.

BDA's directors ran CEO Donald Jakeway out of the corner office nearly a year ago because they felt he kept too low a profile and failed to sell a shiny image of the city-owned property to the public and elected officials. That he'd done a decent job attracting companies, including hospital operator Baptist Health System, to Brooks apparently didn't count for much.

But if the board's right about the power of PR and winning the favor of politicians, Gomez could be a natural.

Here's the problem: The cake seemed to be pre-baked.

Gomez began making his interest in the job known last summer, way before the board launched a formal national search. In no time, insiders from the city, county and beyond were warming to the idea. Indeed, I first wrote about his potential candidacy in September.

Much of the off-the-record chatter described him as a lock for the position.

If you didn't happen to be Leo Gomez or have as many in's as he did, yet you considered yourself up to the job of leading BDA, would you have applied? And if you already had a secure job, would you have risked it to pursue a position for which you've already heard there's a shoo-in?

A lot of people obviously did. But we don't know how many talented leaders and economic development gurus didn't see the point of making the effort. I've heard tell of at least a few instances.

And I can't shake the feeling that this search — for a position critical to South Side development — was closer to being a baked cake than cake batter.

Greg Jefferson is business editor of the San Antonio Express-News. You can reach him at (210) 250-3259 or gjefferson@express-